On Rust in enterprise kernels

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-24 01:00:04

Some context to begin: the nouveau driver handles NVIDIA GPUs. It was, for years, the product of a determined reverse-engineering effort in the absence of any help from NVIDIA; it was first merged into the mainline for the 2.6.33 release in 2009. More recently, NVIDIA has been changing its tune with regard to free-software support for its products, and has been helping with nouveau development. Ben Skeggs, who has worked on nouveau for years, recently took up employment there.

Nouveau has reached a reasonable level of functionality, but the developers in the kernel's DRM (graphics) subsystem are already looking at replacing it, at least for newer GPUs. Specifically, the Nova project has been launched to create a new driver for NVIDIA GPUs going forward. Unlike nouveau, Nova will be written in Rust. The developers involved feel that using Rust is the best way to cope with the firmware interface in newer GPUs, which can change at any time without notice. Nova is a relatively young project that may not be ready to enter the mainline for, possibly, some years.

An entirely different part of the kernel is the Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) subsystem. In short, VFIO is an interface for the control of I/O memory-management units (IOMMUs) that can be used to safely give access to a device to a user-space process. The IOMMU will ensure that the device only has access to the memory belonging to the process using it, preventing the device from (accidentally or deliberately) overwriting other parts of the system. VFIO is often used in systems running virtualized guests; each guest can be given access to the devices it needs while keeping the system as a whole secure.